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This is a very interesting thread, and I want to venture forth without any 
expertise in the issues being discussed. Roy Weintraub wrote: 
 
 
"Today, as I look around at the still relative absence of women in 
highest levels of the economics profession, I hear the echos of a 
time past when female graduate students were asked about their 
seriousness for academic work if they were married, or planned 
children, questions asked of them by the most courtly and gentle and 
kind men who would have defended womenhood as they did mother and 
apple pie" 
 
I am missing the relevance of this analogy. Did the kindly southern 
gentlemen academicians take any actions to support the women students in 
their quest for excelling in graduate education?  Did they recognize the 
students'  individual abilities? If they defended  womanhood, I am sure it 
was of the traditional, passive, put-on-a-pedestal kind. That does not seem 
to be the picture that emerges of Keynes's relationship with his Jewish 
colleagues and friends. 
 
"In both cases the underlying set of attitudes is based on 
"difference". That attitude is one of "I am different from you" and 
that difference was, and of course still is, valorized. That is one 
of the issues that Marie Duggan put forward, and I think is worth 
attending to." 
 
On a broader note,  the difference that is used for valorizing one over the 
'other' is very much contingent on the particular time and place. Social 
movements change them gradually;  but individuals, even otherwise great 
ones, rarely transcend them in ways that would satisfy later generations. If 
Keynes showed his humanity concretely in helping not only Jewish 
scholars, but also Jews as a group (mentioned in a previous post about an 
article by Anand Chandavarkar), then he deserves credit for not only his 
actions, but maybe some inner goodness that is of a transcendental nature. 
 
Sincerely, 
 
Sumitra  Shah 
St. John's University 
 
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